Let’s all calm down a bit, shall we? There is really no call for the Republican Party to eat itself alive, consume its own progeny in a frenzy of recrimination, or throw out its fundamental principles with which, as it happened, roughly half the electorate agreed.

Their candidate lost the election — as almost every challenger to every incumbent president in modern American history has done before. Add to that overwhelming weight of precedent the fact that this challenger was almost nobody’s favourite from the outset.

Mitt Romney won the nomination by default after the elimination of the outlandish outsiders, the retreads and the obscure nobodies. He had inspired only half-hearted enthusiasm even among the most faithful party supporters until he chose Paul Ryan as his running mate — which seemed to show a surprising flash of genuine nerve and inspiration.

Then he had a sensationally successful first debate which made the party — and the nation — look at him again with real interest. After that he improved and, by the end, was putting in a creditable and consistent, if overly cautious, performance. But that was not enough to beat a sitting president who had not only the traditional advantage of incumbency, but an unprecedented historic significance as the first black candidate to win the White House.

Did Romney and the Republican establishment who ran his campaign make major mistakes? Yes, they did. The statements on immigration which seemed to be advocating a programme of voluntary repatriation (deportation by another name), and a refusal to compromise on the status of illegal migrants who wished to make good in America, certainly helped to secure the Latino vote for Obama. Allowing himself to be associated with the militant anti-abortion lobby alienated women, notably single ones who knew that for them this could be a very urgent personal issue.

But his major disadvantage was one that he could never renounce: he was a rich man who had made his fortune by dealing in precisely the sort of capital investment which made ordinary employees feel powerless. This was, paradoxically, his singular claim to expertise: as he said again and again on the stump, he knew how to create jobs, but every blue collar worker understood that he also knew how to destroy them.

And there was never going to be any way he could pretend that he knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such decisions: the devastating closures of companies and local factories which have undermined the lives and the confidence of millions of American voters in swing states like Ohio.

Neither, of course, could Mr Obama, who had spent his early career as a “community organiser” (ie political activist) and then as a tenured academic. But that lack of connection with ordinary working people — whom Americans call the “middle class” — never touched Obama, who presented himself as the voice of the underdog even though he was a fully qualified member of the professional elite who had never known hardship.

So what is to be done? The Republicans do not need a radical reinvention. They need different candidates.

There is a good reason why the most interesting and substantial people did not choose to run this time: they knew that running against any incumbent president, but particularly this one who carried uniquely momentous historical weight, was likely to be an exercise in futility. But next time we will see some real stars emerge as contenders.

The dream ticket would be Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio.

Governor Christie may be coming in for some harsh words right now. His generous comments about the President’s assistance to his devastated state after Hurricane Sandy have been interpreted as excessively helpful to the Obama campaign.

But the party will surely forgive him in the end: Christie is a man who can communicate with real people — as his emotional response to the plight of his state made so clear. He talks the language and understands the problems of men and women struggling to survive in a way that few politicians of either party can credibly manage.

Marco Rubio is Latino — the son of Cuban refugees. He gave a speech to the Republican convention about what coming to America meant to his family that moved me (whose family had gone to America a generation earlier) to tears. It is difficult to imagine any two politicians, of any party, being more convincingly in touch with the country as it now is than these two.

That is what it will take for the Republicans to re-establish a bond with the country. Not ideological meltdown or the wholesale, embattled reconstruction of their political identity: just the chemistry of leaders whose lives and personal experience give them a connection with life as it is lived by most people, and the conviction to give it passionate expression.